Board 8 > Baby It's Cold Outside

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've spent the last several Christmas seasons wondering why in the hell this song was getting so much airtime. I don't remember it being a Christmas standard when I was a kid (80s), and only remember it from once the dustup started onward. I don't like it musically, so I'm wondering if it was just background noise I never paid attention to.

I'm taking the bait, I guess.

The problem stems from applying modern sensibilities to a decidedly old song.

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Llarian posted...

I'm taking the bait, I guess.

The problem stems from applying modern sensibilities to a decidedly old song.

You can't apply modern sensibility naively to a person in order to vilify them, but you can do so to their actual work which exemplifies the issues. FDR probably made a speech that supported segregation at some point, yet we still laud him; we just don't quote the speech as something to honor. The debate was never about whether... whoever wrote the song is a rapist who should be blacklisted, just the song is creepy as fuck and maybe there's other shitty christmas music we can listen to instead

also i don't think there's any bait here. he didn't even mention the controversy in any detail

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I've definitely heard it as long as most other Christmas music.


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NFUN posted...

FDR probably made a speech that supported segregation at some point

Segregation via internment camps, maybe

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NFUN posted...

You can't apply modern sensibility naively to a person in order to vilify them, but you can do so to their actual work which exemplifies the issues. FDR probably made a speech that supported segregation at some point, yet we still laud him; we just don't quote the speech as something to honor. The debate was never about whether... whoever wrote the song is a rapist who should be blacklisted, just the song is creepy as fuck and maybe there's other shitty christmas music we can listen to instead

also i don't think there's any bait here. he didn't even mention the controversy in any detail

He doesn't have to go into detail, it's rehashed every holiday season for reasons I will never understand. The rest of your point is fair and well taken.

I did not know it was written by a Tony award winning songwriter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Loesser

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paperwarior posted...

Segregation via internment camps, maybe

oh yeah that was a thing. completely forgot about that when making my point. definitely something you should judge him by, but you get my gist

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I've still never heard it.

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I've never heard the song before the controversy came up.

If you want to talk about a rapey song that's modern though... Blurred Lines.

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I prefer Jump In My Car by David Hasselhoff

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VintageGin posted...

meme

love, stealing

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Super Cluster Brain - Its not even a Christmas song in the first place! Nothing in the lyrics references Christmas or anything Christmas-adjacent. Its at most a winter song. Die Hard is much more a Christmas movie than this is a Christmas song.

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I'm more familiar with the controversy around the song than with the song itself

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Leonhart4 posted...

I'm more familiar with the controversy around the song than with the song itself

^

in fact I don't even think I'm familiar with the song at all

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Tom Bombadil posted...

love, stealing

I may or may not have just posted it to my facebook >_>

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i heard the song more after the controversy i guess, but was completely unaware of the controversy when i first heard of it

that said, it is super rape-y-sounding, and while that is a product of the times, it might mean it's not particularly suited to be played as often on today's radio as it is
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I've heard it all my life in all things Christmas-related, hard to believe so many here were unfamiliar. I don't think I've been hearing it more than before in recent years, I'd say the frequency has been about the same.

It would be sad if Baby got put in a cultural corner for the rest of time, not because of overfamiliarity or the surfeit of awful contemporary recordings of the tune but because its rapey. Its not. This is really the ultimate pre-Walk of Shame anthem, with no actual shame involved on either duet partners part. It should be and generally is understood that this is a dialogue between who both very much want to get it on but only one of whom, in the songs period setting, has the freedom to explicitly say so.


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It gets played here in the UK but only because Tom Jones did a cover of it back in 99.

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